More to come in the next couple of months, I hope, on both repeaters and arithmetic circuits; there is also a pile of systems work from last year's QEC conference and other places that needs to be polished up and submitted, as well as a stack of half-completed things...

...ah, for a trio of clones! Then one of us could teach, one could spend time with the family, one could do research, and one would have to do the drudge work. I suppose we'd have to rotate; I love all three of those first topics, but no one would want to be stuck with the paperwork forever :-).

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Biden's Travels

Now, the team claims the list is incomplete, but as an expat living where I do, there is a conspicuous hole: um, Japan? I realize that prime ministers here change often enough that it's difficult to keep up, but Japan is still the second biggest economy on the planet, and one of the U.S.'s top trading and defense partners.

Has Biden really not met with any Japanese leaders, or is the absence an oversight? It's not that he's shunning East, South, or Southeast Asia; he's met with leaders from almost every Asian country you can name, except Bangladesh and Thailand. Okay, he's allowed to not hit every single one; but still, Japan?

Likewise, another near the top of any U.S. list should be that Neighbor to the North, Canada. Hmm.

The Candidate of Change

No, for you myopic Americans, I'm not talking about Obama, McCain, or anyone else on that continent. I'm talking about YurikoKoike, a candidate for president of the Liberal Democratic Party here in Japan. She has held several cabinet positions, and is fluent in both Arabic and English, having received her degree from Cairo University. She's a bit of a long shot, but is supported by Koizumi, the former prime minister, who is still very popular. And, she has been dubbed the candidate of change, which many people would agree is desirable in Japanese politics.

The LDP's internal presidential election is tomorrow (Monday), Japan time. The rules for that election are apparently variable from election to election, but involve mostly members of parliament, and some local leaders, I believe. Taro Aso is expected to win.

Because the LDP is still the largest and strongest political party here, the person elected president normally becomes prime minister. Could Japan wind up with a woman chief executive before America does? Stay tuned.

Quantum Arithmetic

I get occasional mail from people asking me about quantum arithmetic. I usually point them to the Qwiki page on arithmetic I created a couple of years ago, which is a list of useful papers, rather than an actual technical description.

Most of the papers there are about specific arithmetic circuits, building from binary integer addition to modular exponentiation, and include some examples of actual experimental implementations.

This morning, I ran across some lecture notes by Ekert, Hayden, and Inamori on "Basic concepts in quantum computation," at Quantiki. The notes contain a nice intro to the theory behind reversible, binary, modular arithmetic.

The disparities in "human capital" and "R&D environment" are interesting.

Even more telling are the drops from last year's index -- Japan fell from 2nd to 12th, South Korea from 3rd to 8th, due at least partly to shifts in their methodology. As always in some ranking system, you can engineer the results to fit your intuition :-).

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Happy Anniversary

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Morris Worm. At the time, I had recently moved from ISI's computing center into the MOSIS Project, giving up my position as a sysadmin and becoming a regular programmer on the research staff.

I did get called back in to help a little, but since we were using VMS, the fix for MOSIS was pretty easy: unplug the network, and go back to work. Other folks I worked with, including Dale Chase, Jim Koda, Tom Wisniewski, had a much rougher day, dealing with several BSD VAXen and a large number of Suns.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

No Colbert on Linux, No Olympics on Windows

No joy. npviewer.bin, the Firefox plugin for Flash video, crashes reliably. A little googling turns up that I'm not the only one with this problem -- it has been The Daily Show's Developers' Blog. (Whine: why is it always me?)

A few weeks ago, I wanted to watch the Olympics in some fashion besides Japanese broadcast. Went to MSNBC.com...dang, Silverlight. I only run Linux on my laptop. Grumble. Dig out the Windows XP laptop I have at work for doing the obligatory Word documents. Download Silverlight. Install. Crashes. Reliably. (Whine: why is it always me?)